miércoles, 19 de julio de 2017

The room was one chaotic scene. Not only
there was paint all over the walls, but also two bodies were lying on the
floor, faces down and covered with white blankets, that seemed really out of
place for some reason. They weren’t a strange sight as that room had been the
scene of a violent crime. The people from the police had been working there for
a whole day now. As they ate something or had a smoke, two detectives had
decided to enter the premises and begin the investigation formally.

Of course, the stench of the massacre had not
cleared the room yet. All the doors had been opened but not the windows, as a
gust of wind could disturb the scene or bring in foreign components. They
wanted everything to be as it had been for the week or so since the murders had
occurred. It was a shame for the police to only now realize what had happened
in that poor neighborhood, which so often appeared in the news being portrayed
as some kind of doorway to the flames of hell.

However, every comparison to the reign of Satan
was very accurate at the moment. The scene was hellish and there was no
surprise when Detective Keaton couldn’t hold his breakfast after looking at the
room once. Klein, on the other side, was made of a stronger material. He had
seen so many gruesome scenes like this one; it just didn’t do anything for him.
He could even eat in front of an open body, a fact that had always shocked all
of his peers, even the coroners.

As Keaton was tended by some of the men that
had been eating outside, Klein decided to put on some plastic slippers and just
have a tour of the room. It was actually a one-bedroom apartment. On one end,
there was the door he had entered through. On the opposite side, another door
was open, revealing a very dirty shower. The bathroom appeared no to have been
the most taken care of place in that building. In the main room, there was a
bed on the corner and the bodies were lying next to it.

The blood, as said before, was all over the
place: on the bed, the walls, the bathroom floor, the alarm clock on the only
table in the premises and also on the sole electric heater, which would have
been used to cook food with the help of the only wall socket in the room. It
was really a dreary scene. Klein bent his knees next to the bodies and lifted
one of the white blankets. Beneath it, he saw what he had always hated to see
in the job: the body of a young human being. It made him mad and hopeless. Next
to it was a woman, possibly the mother. Both covered in blood.

Keaton was on the door, covering his nose with
a handkerchief. It was very like him to have such an item that only older
people use at the time. He was younger than Klein but somehow he felt like a
grandfather of sorts. He had apparently recuperated from watching the scene and
was now trying to focus his attention on Klein. He told him that the coroner
had sent for the bodies and that the ambulances would be there in a short time.
Klein nodded but said nothing, still looking at the scene.

They had been partners for quite a long time,
so Keaton knew exactly which face meant what. Right then, it was clear to him
that Klein was thinking hard about the facts of the incident and it was best
not to interrupt him as he hated people to do that. It was him who stopped the
silence and asked his companion if he had asked the people from the police
department about all the details of the scene, every object they had found and
anything related to the corpses, as well as the apartment.

Keaton handed his partner a folder where it
said, quite clearly, that the woman and the child were not the owners of the
apartment. Furthermore, none of them had any type of contract with the owner to
live there. At least, no official contract had been recorded. So the first
visit they had to make was to the owner. They could have gone to some family
member of the victims but heir names had not been found yet. No identity cards,
no data at all. It was as if they had been forgotten by the world.

Minutes later, they were hopping in the car,
rushing through the streets towards a more quiet, peaceful suburb. It had a lot
of similar houses, like in the movies. Getting to the house that they were
looking for was very tricky as most of the streets ended on a roundabout, with
four or five houses sitting around. They saw children laughing, people playing
with their dogs and couples holding hands. It was always awkward to see that
after witnessing the scene of a murder.

Life suddenly seemed meaningless for some
reason. If someone could eliminate people in that fashion, it was clear that
humans have the awful capacity to exterminate themselves. And what policemen do
is to defend some humans against the rest. People always say good always wins
but it was sometimes difficult to believe such a claim when, several times a
week, you see proof that mankind is just made out of slightly evolved animals.
But animals anyway. Keaton and Klein finally found the house, walked to the
door and rang.

A little girl opened the door. Her face was
covered in chocolate and she just laughed. The two men were petrified right on
the spot by this action. They had been taken by surprise by the sheer happiness
of a child who is innocent and has not had a way of knowing how the world
really works. The mother came in running, also laughing for some reason. She asked
for their business and they asked for her husband. She offered them entrance
but they refused, preferring to stay by the door.

The man was called several times until he
descended the stairs. It was clearly a day off for him as he was wearing boxers
and a t-shirt tainted with grease and few mustard stains. They asked if he was
named Victor Gould and he said yes. They asked if he owned an apartment
building in the city and he said yes. Apparently, it had belonged to his father
for years but he had received the place as a gift when the man had died some
years ago. He confesses soon he rarely visited the place.

The detectives promptly explained the reason
for their visit. The man was appalled by what he heard and his wife, who had
been listening close by, ran to her children and tried to keep them busy, away
from the awful conversation. The man told them he had no idea a family had been
living in that apartment. He had a man to go and collect rent but he kept
papers on the building, which he showed to the police. He had no way of knowing
a mother and her child had been living there illegally.

That’s when Keaton realized what was going on.
They rushed to the morgue, on the basement of the police department. There, the
coroner explained to them that there was indeed no way of telling who the
victims were but he could tell them that they had suffered for days before
actually dying. They had been starving for a while, maybe even up to a month.
They had little inside of them when he checked the stomachs. He concluded the
kid was dead when it had been stabbed. But not the mother.

Someone knew they were there. Someone had let
them in and was possibly blackmailing them, threatening to call the deportation
office and get them sent back to wherever they had come from. That same someone
possibly stabbed them for some crazy reason.

When he entered his own tiny apartment that
night, Klein went straight for the bottle of scotch he kept in the kitchen.
Booze was the only thing that could help him sleep when the realization of how
much a dump the world was came to his mind. It happened very often, judging by
the number of empty bottles crammed in a box.

sábado, 23 de julio de 2016

No matter how loud she got, it wasn’t loud
enough for anyone to hear her, after all, it was very late at night in a small
city in which people always went to bed exactly a the same hour. And even if
they didn’t fall asleep, they were inside their homes, unable to help anyone in
need. Some said, days later, that they had heard a scream coming from somewhere
that night. Psychologists said the people that swore by that were just guilty,
saying things that didn’t happen.

She yelled and screamed more than once. She
fought her attacker with everything she had: her purse, her heels, but nothing
worked. And least of all against his knife, which turned the street into a
butcher’s shop. The police had a real problem when discovering the body because
she hadn’t been murdered in alley or by a river. Veronica Slate had been
assassinated two blocks away from her house, the night she was graduating from
a business class.

The killer’s face was known to no one and it
was very possible that none of the town’s inhabitants had ever seen him.
Mainly, because he had never been there before and would never come back. He
had no need to and he was dedicated to what he did so he knew exactly how to do
things, how not to be predictable and silly over such obvious things as location.
People invented his face in their minds, bases on images of killers they had
seen in movies. Of course, they were not accurate.

He moved on to another town and stayed there
for a week in a small hotel by the main square. He had no urge there, no need
to make a move. He just walked around and chilled until he decided it had been
enough. He took another bus and there was a second victim by the end of a very
traumatic week because of the celebrations of the national day and a scandal
involving a senator and his daughter.

The body of Rosa Pérez was found in the middle
of the most used avenue in that town. It was a place filled with people every
single day but, somehow, no one had seen anything. It was a bigger town than
the one before so they were sure a camera would have picked up something. But
it didn’t. There was nothing they could use, no witnesses again. And they
didn’t consider the cases linked but an isolated and strange attack.

Rosa worked near by, in laundry place that
worked all night. She had a bag filled with dirty clothes the night she was
killed. The killer had used a gun with a silencer and many people linked her
death to gang violence or some sort of vengeance killing. Her children had to
bury their mother without a single shadow of understanding above her case. No
one knew anything, again.

That month, another two women were killed by
the same man. One was choked with her own necklace and the other one was run
over by a car at least twice. The scenes were always disgusting and it was difficult
for every policeman to process those cases, as they hated to get their hands to
close to such horrifying situations. The coroners were in charge of everything
and they were the ones telling the people what had happened and why. Yet, they
were still such random acts of violence that no one dared to link one thing to
the other.

As for the killer, he stopped altogether for
several months. He was an unstable person that was obvious. But he was and
amazing actor too. Not that it was his job, but he could anyone believe
whatever he wanted them to believe. Most people loved to think they lived in a
perfect world, filled with magic and love ant only beautiful things. And he
benefited from that, from ignorance and their willingness to simply ignore that
evil was out there, walking the streets.

He had killed people for a long time now and
kept a list of how many he had killed. It was very uncommon, but he knew that
one day he would be the one to go to the police and tell them he had done all
of those murders, all of those noted in that small notebook. He had dates and
sometimes even names. He knew that there would come a time when he wouldn’t be
able to do it as he did it now so he had plans to surrender himself.

In his mind, he would win in that case. He
already had won in any case, because no one knew who he was or that he was the
same attacker of all those women. He had a clear advantage over anyone that
might investigate a little bit too much. He also thought that a very good
detective would actually see clues all over the place. But this was reality and
there were no Sherlock Holmes’ roaming the streets solving crimes.

So he stopped for a few months but began again
some time in the winter. To him, it was fun to do it in different places,
different seasons and to different kind of people. He had even killed a couple
of men but it didn’t feel exactly the same. He preferred women although the
urge might come he would like to overcome someone as strong as him and that
could prove to be interesting.

His strength and with were his weapons, his
most important ones. It didn’t matter what he used to actually killed somehow.
Murder weapons could be anything in the world. But his head, his brain, was a
machine that planned everything to perfection and that was the real weapon to
be protected against. And no one knew it existed.

He always read in the papers, the rare times
his crimes made it there, that killers always had issues with their parents and
had problems during sexual intercourse. The truth was he had always had the
best relationship with his parents. He had always loved them and they had loved
them back. He had the best education and a happy childhood filled with almost
everything a child would love to have, including the unconditional love only
two really good parents could give.

As for the sex thing, he never had intercourse
with his victims. That could prove too obvious to link all crimes, more over if
he had an accident and left his DNA inside the women. No, he wasn’t that stupid
so when he needed to have sexual interaction with someone, he would call a
friend or hire a call girl. And he treated them right, always. He wasn’t too
rough or violent; he was just like any other man. Except he was a murderer.

Sometimes, he loved to imagine them discovering
who he was. He was thrilled by that, the moment someone would notice something
like a blood stained shirt or something similar, not that he would be that
careless. But he always had fun picturing those ridiculous scenes, created out
of movie scenes that always portrayed people’s ingenuity to perfection. But no
one ever asked him anything; no woman ever said a word to him before or after
sex. Nothing.

That winter, he killed at least five women.
One of them was killed in the middle of a road, so she was found several months
later, when the snow began to disappear. Of course, every town and family was
destroyed but he was never there to see or hear anything about it. He tried to
avoid that because he was simply not interested in the result of what he did.
Maybe that was the only thing that made him a little obvious, at least in his
personal concept.

He would love to get away as soon as possible
and analyze his urges in order to know if he wanted to do it again or if he
went back to his place, to his normal life with a job and a pet and friends.
That man was a monster, no doubt. But he was also a neighbor, a coworker, the
man you see walking down the street with a cup of coffee, rushing to the subway
or smiling at something funny.

Killers are people, people that have been
deformed by what’s inside of them which can have several forms and shapes and
interpretations. And this particular beast was one no one ever saw because they
didn’t want to. They had refused to believe someone like them could be capable
of what he was capable. And he like that.

domingo, 13 de septiembre de 2015

I just kept running, until I woke up and
realized there was nothing to run away from. I was sweating a bit and breathing
heavily, as if I had really been running on the street. I just sat down on my
bed and tried to calm down. There was nothing more that I could do than calm
down and try to sleep again. After all, I had woken up at five in the morning
and it was a Saturday. I decided to go to the kitchen, have some orange juice
and then go back to my bed and lay there until sleep appeared again. To be honest,
I was a bit scared of dreaming all of that again but I knew that was very
unlikely. When I got sleepy again, I just covered myself entirely with the
sheets and the bedspread. I didn’t dream a thing and woke up some four hours
after, not really rested but at least calmed.

That day, I decided to visit my family’s grave
in the cemetery. I don’t know why, but I needed to do that. Somehow, I thought
those awful dreams had come again only because my family was resentful of me
not tending to them properly, not even thinking about them or putting some
flowers on their graves. SO that was exactly what I did. I bought the most
beautiful little bouquets and put them on their graves. I didn’t pray, I never
did, but instead tried to apologize to them because I had been such a bad son.
I knew coming to a cemetery didn’t really change anything, but I knew that I
had left my family to one side, as if they had never existed. I cried a bit
while asking for forgiveness and it was then that she appeared.

It sounds insane but she was the woman of my
dreams. And by that I mean she’s the one that appears there every time. I
didn’t remember if she had a name in my dreams but once I saw her straight into
the eyes, I realized she knew exactly whom I was and was there to talk to me.
However, we just looked at each other as if talking or moving was the stupidest
thing we could ever do. But finally, it was me who asked her what she was doing
there, why she had come. The woman seemed confused at first, but then realized
something and a smile appeared on her lips. She just said “I’ll be waiting in
the car” and turned around. Ten minutes later, after saying goodbye to my
parents, I was walking towards a car I knew to be hers, even if I hadn’t see it
before.

I opened the passenger door and sat down. I
closed the door and she started the engine. She told me my car would be at my
home in no time, but I didn’t care because I was beginning to fell like in my
dream. Not as scared but I knew something was coming and I had to be calm in order
to get to the bottom of everything. The woman drove the car out of the city and
after an hour we had traveled several kilometers. We finally arrived to a
small, quiet town, where se parked the car in the main square and told me to
follow her, once again. We walked two blocks and then we entered a house.

The house was not abandoned or anything. There
was a family watching TV there but they seemed to ignore us, or something
stranger… We crossed the house to the other side, where we got to a different
street. There, the woman waited for a moment and hen opened another door I
hadn’t even seen. I followed her and realized it was the same place where I had
been tortured in my dreams.I turned
around to escape but the door was locked. She had sat down on a very old chair
and seemed to be in deep thinking about who knows what. It didn’t seem that the
torture would continue but, still, I was very nervous and had no intention of
staying there more than was necessary. I wondered who she was and why I was
following her like a mad man but felt the answers would not come easily.

She finally seemed to remember where she was
and walked towards me. She got closer, as if she want to kiss me but in reality
she just checked my neck. Then, I felt a very horrible pain in the neck, where
she had touched, falling to the ground as if was much more pain than I could
resist standing up. Somehow, it felt like I had blood all over my hands and
neck but when the pain passed, I realized there was nothing there, I was clean.
I could see that she was now by a table, checking something that was apparently
small in size. I had a thought of killing her and ending all of this in a
single moment but then I realized I had nothing to do it with. Not a knife or
even a good piece of wood.

The woman turned around and indicated me to
come to her side. I complied, but I really didn’t trust her and I did it even
less now that she had taken something from me. That something was the thing she
had been checking on the table, a small object shaped like a cylinder.
Actually, it was bigger than what I felt in my dreams and the moment she had
taken it out. And why wasn’t there any blood if that thing had been inside of
me? I realized then that I had been left alone, that the woman was nowhere to
be seen. I ran to the door and realized it was still locked, putting a very
string barrier between me and everything outside. I wanted to run away, to just
stop reliving that stupid dream but I couldn’t, somehow it was all real.

I checked the object on my hand and felt
something strange, as if I knew what it was used for. My gut told me it was
some kind of implant to follow me, to make sure I did whatever the person that
had put that on me wanted me to do. But why would I be of anyone’s interest? I
was a failed artist that survived working the most menial job in a bank where,
every single day, I just wanted to kill myself or at least kill several other
people. Why would anyone be interested in following me or doing anything to my
life or my body? Weren’t there others that were at least much more interesting
in any aspect?

The woman came back but this time she didn’t
lock the door. She told me she had been checking on the object with people she
knew and realized it was an old implant that was no longer functioning on the
moment of extraction. She also said that, while it had probably some effect on
my behavior for the last few years, it had stopped whatever it was it was meant
to do several years ago. But that was even stranger because why would someone
put an implant on a young person that had nothing to gain or loose form life?
Why where they monitoring me? And who were they?But she didn’t have those answers, she said
she only tracked to device and found me and just needed to know which ones were
still active and which ones weren’t.

Apparently, although she didn’t say it in full
words, she was doing all of this out of guilt. She had worked with the creators
of the devices and now felt it was her moral obligation to remove them all;
before they had any serious consequences on the people they had been implanted
in. It was pretty alarming, but during all that time she was talking,
explaining her reasons and trying for me to understand who she was and what she
had been doing, I just wanted to kill her. It was a feeling I had never felt
before, like an urge but it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. I
wanted to feel her neck broken in my hands and the taste of her blood. And
then, I noticed she had seen it in me.

Too late. I launched myself at her and tried
to strangle her with my own two hands. I pressed hard, feeling her fighting
against my superior strength and superior mind. Her life was running out and I
smiled because that’s what I wanted. I not just her but everyone else too. I
realized my goal was to kill every single person in the world and that, if I
wanted to do it, I could do it. I smile even more and when she stopped
breathing, I laughed and felt like I was in the happiest place in the world. I
left her lifeless body on the floor and the smiled all around me, realizing my
poor and might and thinking of how much more I could do for my needs and for
me. The world was absolutely mine.

I got out of the house and walked up the
street, now in the dark as the night had fallen during my stay in that awful
place. I kept smiling for some more until I got a bullet straight between my
eyes and fell to the ground. I died instantly but the fun part was that I hadn’t
died. Somewhere far away, I woke up again and realized something worse had been
done to me. Not only that device had turned me into a murder, it wasn’t a piece
of metal to know where I was but whom I was. The one that died was just a clone
that had gone insane and the real me… Well, I still don’t know where I am. But I’m
scared of what might come.

martes, 18 de agosto de 2015

As soon as the water touched her skin, the
stains of dirt and blood began to fall to the shower floor and they would
disappear down the drain. She was trembling a bit still, shocked by what had
happened earlier. She tried to clean herself with soap, distracting her from
what she had in mind, but she just couldn’t stop thinking about it. She made
the flow of water to run faster, for more water to fall on her. Her unconscious
wanted to drown her, feeling that would be the only way they could keep on living.
But of course, she didn’t drown in her shower. She just stayed there for
several minutes, as if she needed to clean more from her body that only the
dirt and the blood. When she finally closed the water, she stayed there against
the wall, incapable of crying, incapable of feeling anything.

The rest of that day she spent it home. She
had no need or wanted to parade herself around town, not after what had
happened. The images of what had happened invaded her mind every few seconds,
and she wondered if she would ever feel safe and sane again. She lay in her bed
hours and hours, without eating or drinking anything. Her phone rang several
times as well as her cellphone, but she just didn’t answer. She knew it was
office related and she hated to be disturbed by anything related to it on
weekends, even in better days for her. Or maybe it was her parents that had the
tradition of calling her every Sunday afternoon because they knew it was the
slowest and most boring day for her in the week.

When the phone rang again, she was tempted to
grab it but finally decided against it. Talking may have resulted in awkward
reactions, maybe then she would be able to cry or scream and it just wouldn’t
be appropriate, as too many things would have to be explained. Instead, she
decided to head to the kitchen and have some water. She felt dry and a bit
dizzy but knew that she couldn’t hold any food. She went to the bathroom and
tried to vomit but that was a failure. She just returned to bed and lay there
for the rest of the day, in silence, without a single person to help her
understand what was going to happen to her. Because the truth was that she was
scared for her life, as she felt the every single thing had changed.

She hated to admit it, but she did feel
different. Later that day, she went to the bathroom and spent several minutes
looking at her reflection in the mirror. She moved, looking at her every
feature. And as much as she thought that the change had been physical too, she
had no way to prove that. She looked exactly the same, maybe a little but paler
but no other difference besides that. The poor woman passed her hands over her
face several times, as if trying to wake up fro ma bad dream, but she didn’t
wake up. Instead, she decided to go back asleep, something that scared her
immensely as she had no wish of having nightmares.

The following day, she woke up an hour early,
with big bags under her eyes. She showered, put on her work clothes and then
had a big breakfast with toast, scrambled eggs, a sausage and some orange
juice. She was starving from the day before. It was then that she realized that
wanting to be dead didn’t help anyone at all, less of all her. She had to keep
on going and just live like any other person. What she had done had been
definitive, but s many had done it before her and the world was not going to
end because of it. As she had breakfast, she watched the news on her TV but
nothing interesting had happened the day before or that morning, at least as
far as the televisions news world was concerned. When finished, she just
grabbed her coat and left.

Some forty-five minutes later, she was
arriving at her desk, leaving her coat on a hanger on one of the sides of her
cubicle. The morning was cold and everyone had decided to put on their coats
back on, even going as far as putting on scarves or gloves. The morning went on
without a single accident or incident. There was always someone complaining
about the low amount of paper in the copy machine or someone else commenting on
the weather, but that day everyone seemed to be too cold to even speak as much
as they normally did. When she decided to grab a cup of coffee, as she always
did, she realized that something was happening on the ground floor. She could
see people gathering from the twenty-second floor, where she was standing.

Then, a couple of police patrols arrived and
finally an ambulance. Maybe someone had fainted or had been… Yes, one of the
paramedics rushed out of the ambulance as soon as his vehicle had stopped. The
police were putting the yellow ribbon around the place to stop the people from
coming in. In the coffee room, other people had arrived and were looking
exactly at what she was looking at. One of them finally said “Oh my god, it’s a
body!” and she realized that was it. There was a person down there, probably
dead. Maybe he or she had jumped from one of the many floors of the tower or
maybe something else had happened. Any way, their supervisor came and asked
them all to go back to their desks.

At lunch, everyone wanted to know what had
happened and the most skilled people with gossip knew everything about it
within a couple of minutes of being down there talking to other people that
loved to gossip. Apparently, the one who had jumped had been a woman, by the
name of Marcela Jones. Marcela worked in the twentieth floor, in a company that
had something to do with electronics. The point was, she had just run for the
window and fell to her death. So it was a suicide and as our woman heard this,
she felt sick to her stomach and had to run to the toiled. For the rest of the
workday, she felt very sick.

She felt better once the day was over and she
was on a bus home. But maybe the word wasn’t better, but less likely to do the
same thing that Marcela had done. It was crazy but she had seen that woman’s
face once that week and it hadn’t been at work. It had been in another place,
one that she was trying to forget but that kept coming back to her mind.
Worried by these visions, she remained in her room all night, again without
eating. She was thinking about what had happened today and what had happened
over the weekend. The two had to be related, especially after she had seen the
news and realized the state of Marcela’s body. She felt like shit, thinking and
thinking without really achieving anything. She felt guilty and sick to her
stomach.

But by the following morning, she knew what
she had to do and it was maybe the toughest decision she had ever taken.
Instead of leaving for her work, she decided to go to the nearest police
station. There, she asked for someone to listen to her testimony, as she wanted
to confess a crime she had committed. She felt awful, waiting for an agent to
come to talk to her. She gone to the police station by her work, as they knew
more about Marcela’s death that anyone else. Finally, a detective asked her to
follow him to an interrogation room and then he asked if she could state her
name and profession for the record.

Her name was Linda Bloom and she worked as
business consultant in the biggest firm in the city. She wanted to confess that
on the night of the previous Saturday, she had assassinated a man, whom she
blamed for the suicide of Marcela Jones. The detective was surprised but the
first thing that he asked was about the relation between her actions and Marcela.
Linda explained that Stuart Carter, the man she had killed, had brutally
assaulted several women for the last few months in the city. She knew this
because she had managed to escape and, after killing him with a hammer, she had
seen some pictures in his house, from where she recognized Marcela’s face. The
officer asked her for the address of the house where she had killed Carter and
left her there.

Hours later he came back, and she was
officially arrested. They had found the body where she had told them that they
would find it and also the albums of pictures the man took of the women he had
apparently assaulted. They had no proof of this just then, but with time they
would find out that the man was a monster and that the only person that ever
stood in his way was Linda. She had been able to grab the hammer after she
escaped his “studio” and just hit him in the head with it several times. She
did it until he stopped moving and then just ran out, covered in blood and
filth from the place they were in.

Linda had to wait for a trial until all the
evidence was gathered and, by the time they decided to convict her, at least
six months had already passed. Although it was revealed that she was going to be
the man’s last victim, she had failed to report the murder sooner and had
neglected to tell the police about the pictures she had seen, which could have
prevented Marcela’s death. Linda was condemned to five years in prison and that
time was enough to make her loose all her will to live. She died behind bars
only a year after entering the penitentiary.